PS4, Xbox One, Win, PS3, 360, Wii U, 3DS, PS Vita Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment At first glance, Lego Marvel's Avengers assembles the right team. Continuing developer TT Games' history of translating entertainment properties into Lego adventure sets, Lego Marvel's Avengers' 10-hour open-world campaign has plenty to do and a sense of humor that keeps the game entertaining. But technical and mechanical issues disassemble its charm. Lego Marvel's Avengers is actually based on several Avengers movies, including Age of Ultron, and select moments and flashbacks from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor: The Dark World and more. TT Games doesn't stray from the film base, though the story's jumps between the present day and flashbacks of certain heroes' pasts make it feel a little fractured at times. the story feels a little fractured at times The mechanics are simple, and to returning Lego game players, familiar: Hit the things, fight the bad guys and build.
Every level involves gratifyingly smashing an entire room's inhabitants and contents to build a tool or object to move forward. Splashing pieces around and building shiny new things felt like ripping open a new box of Legos. Levels strike an even balance between exploration and main objectives. The main backdrop is New York City, an open world filled with side quests and missions to be completed. There are also other locations to wander around in and explore, like the SHIELD base, Stark Tower and my personal favorite, Asgard. Throughout the levels, players will create tag-team duos from over 200 unlockable Marvel characters. They can easily switch between characters, and pair any duo they see fit. There's a co-op option if a friend wants to tag along and play. However, I found that certain scenes tended to leave one player out of the action for the sake of cinematic battles. I often felt lost Worse, I often felt lost, unsure of what the game wanted me to do, when to do it and how.
Objectives often felt muddled and lacked direction; Lego Marvel's Avengers did a terrible job in communicating what I needed to accomplish. I can remember countless times running around a level, wondering what I was supposed to do, before finally stumbling upon some sort of direction that nudged me the right way. When all else failed, a help beacon popped up to nudge me on the right path ... but it felt a little too late. This severely undermined everything Lego Marvel's Avengers does well. For example, the game introduces an X-ray tablet that you'll use to scan the screen for otherwise invisible Lego studs, which are required to progress. It's not always clear when to use this tablet, and scanning is tedious. This led to a moment at SHIELD's headquarters that hit a particular nerve. I needed to find a car and drive to the location of the Tesseract, and I was stalled by a lock on the tire. I spent a good 20 minutes looking for clues on how to unlock it, until I accidentally hit the X button and brought up the X-ray tablet.
Five minutes of trial and error later, I was able to find the missing studs that unlocked the car tire. The only thing that saved me from these moments was seeing Iron Man sass Thor while sipping a strawberry smoothie, or an adorable Tony Stark waddle across the screen looking for his Iron Man suit. It kept the game lighthearted and fun. But those cutscenes, using dialogue ripped directly from the films, had their own problems. Voices were often painfully loud, or lower than other characters in the same scene, which made them hard to understand. It also seemed that some character lines were cycled in at random, resulting in some phrases seeming out of place or entirely nonsensical, and some one-liners dropped during combat made no sense in that context.TT Games’ LEGO series makes me happy. I love the art, the humor, and most of the gameplay. Breaking stuff and collecting studs is a form of meditation for me, a great way to unwind after a long day. That said, some of these games work better than others.
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was one of the best, an original game based on the Marvel Comics properties, with an absolutely amazing cast of characters to unlock and play. The same can’t be said for LEGO Marvel’s Avengers. Based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and featuring levels based on both Avengers films as well as the two Captain America movies, Iron Man 3, and Thor: The Dark World, LEGO Marvel’s Avengers struggles to bring everything together in a cohesive fashion. The individual levels and hubs inspired by these films are all a lot of fun, but they don’t flow together nearly as well as they should. The game opens with a scene from Avengers: Age of Ultron, dropping you in the middle of the action and giving you the chance to hit the bricks with all of the main Avengers members. Shoot Hawkeye’s arrows, fly with Captain America, Hulk smash. It’s a good chance to figure out your favorites—something that matters a little more once you hit the open world hubs and dive into free play, where you can choose which character you control and using characters you’re more familiar with will make it easier for solving side puzzles if 100-percenting the game is your mission.
Once you’re through that, however, the game jumps back to scenes from the first Avengers film, and then skips around to the other aforementioned movies. The haphazard flow through the material is confusing, and occasionally nonsensical. While that doesn’t diminish the fun of each level, it does keep the game from coming together into an adventure more than the sum of its parts—something the actual Marvel Cinematic Universe has succeeded at doing so far. Where LEGO Marvel’s Avengers works best is in TT Games’ signature gameplay. The familiar action of smashing bricks to rack up a huge stud count, and switching between characters to solve puzzles, returns in fine fashion. Characters each have specific abilities and, in a welcome addition, many roster choices now have combo attacks, which are intuitive and easy to pull off. The combos attacks add some nice variety to TT’s long-standing gameplay formula, and sets up some hilarious sequences. Between levels, players can explore the game’s hubs, including a massive representation of Manhattan.
Side missions are scattered everywhere, and while most are simple and easy to complete, it offers another way to unlock characters and capture some of those coveted gold bricks that help signify game completion. Many of the unlockable characters overlap in terms of their power sets, and some fall into the “who’s that” category of the Marvel Universe. Still, you’ll find characters from the Marvel Netflix original shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, as well as some newer comic book sensations like Squirrel Girl, and such inclusions make the quest to find them all worthwhile. What you won’t find, though, are the movie characters licensed to other companies that fall outside of the MCU, however. No Spider-Man, X-Men, or Fantastic Four are here, which seems like a huge gap. Inexplicably, Guardians of the Galaxy’s large cast of characters is also absent, which just makes no sense at all. For those characters that are present, the voiceovers are uniformly awesome, if not always context appropriate.